Mercy and ferocity

The future Edward I of England had an unpromising start to his career. He was surprisingly malleable, torn between loyalty to his father, Henry III, and the rebel barons led by Simon de Montfort. At one point he was suspected of conspiring to depose the king, and his habit of oath-breaking was satirised in a Montfortian ballad, The Song of Lewes:

“He is a lion by his pride and ferocity; by his inconstantly and changeableness he is a pard, not holding steadily his word or his promise, and excusing himself with fair words.”

The nadir of the young Edward’s fortunes came at the Battle of Lewes in 1264, when his undisciplined pursuit of the Londoners lost the battle for his father. He spent a year in humiliating captivity, which gave Edward much time to ponder his mistakes. In the summer of 1265 he broke free and staged a dramatic coup that ended in the bloody slaughter of Evesham. The massacre of Earl Simon and his followers saddled Edward with fresh problems, as he was now the target of a blood-feud.

When the revolt of the Disinherited broke out, Edward was among the first to seize forfeit land and money. He wasn’t quite as rapacious as his colleague Earl Gilbert de Clare, the ‘red dog’ of Gloucester, but certainly grabbed his share. Among other lands, Edward seized the manor of Luton, once in the possession of Henry de Montfort. Henry had been cut in half by a broadsword at Evesham, and Edward wept at his funeral. He managed to wipe away his tears before taking possession of Luton just four days later.

Over the winter months of 1265, Edward came to realise two things. First, the sheer folly of the policy of disinheritance, which left half the landed class of England destitute and with no option except to fight. Second, the pressing need to reconstruct his reputation in the public eye. A prince who was perceived as faithless, one who waged war on his own people, was never going to enjoy popular support.

The first sign of his changed attitude was at Axholme in Lincolnshire, where Edward laid siege to a nest of rebel barons holed up in the dreary fens. When they eventually surrendered, he spared their lives on condition they stood trial at London. Predictably, every one of the barons broke their oath and went back into rebellion.

Edward showed the same clemency in further military operations. After he stormed the rebel-held town of Winchelsea, he spared the townsfolk on condition they abandoned their lives of piracy. As a result of his mercy, ‘great tranquillity was spread over that sea’. Nor was there any question of disinheritance. Instead the barons of the port towns were permitted to have their lands, houses and chattels, as well as ancient liberties guaranteed by the king and his predecessors.

A few months later Edward defeated the outlaw knight, Adam Gurdon, and let him live: this clemency was not extended to Adam’s peasant followers, who were hanged on the trees of Alton forest. In 1267 Edward raced north to crush the revolt of John de Vescy in Northumbria, and spared the ringleaders after he stormed their base at Alnwick Castle. John had carried the severed foot of Simon de Montfort back to Alnwick and kept it inside a silver shoe; it was said to have magic healing properties, but proved unable to repel swords and arrows.  

This policy had the desired effect. Edward’s reputation soared among English chroniclers. In place of the devious ‘Leopard’ of earlier years, he was now ‘a gallant knight who should be king hereafter’; the king’s ‘renowned first-born son’; one ‘whose mercy is always inestimable and universal’.

Edward arguably took mercy too far. He pardoned a dangerous pirate, Henry Pethun, and an outlaw named Walter Devyas. These men showed their gratitude by immediately reverting to lives of crime. Henry Pethun vanished on the high seas, never to be seen again, but Walter was finally caught on the Scottish border and beheaded for his many arsons, robberies and murders.

All of this is virtually unrecognisable from the Longshanks of popular imagination: the ruthless tyrant who brutally executed William Wallace and harried the Welsh and the Scots without mercy. The truth is that the gallant knight and the brutal conqueror existed in the same man. Much of the success of Edward’s reign was due to the calculated mercy he showed after Evesham. Men who had surrendered to him, such as Adam Gurdon and John de Vescy, served him loyally in the Welsh and Scottish wars. The king’s peculiar mixture of ferocity and mercifulness was expressed in The Song of Caerlaverock, composed in 1300:

“For none experience his bite

Who are not envenomed by it.

But he is soon revised

With sweet good-naturedness

If they seek his friendship

And wish to come to his peace”.

 

 

To the woods and fields

The death of Simon de Montfort and most of his captains at Evesham in 1265 left their supporters in England scattered and divided. When the war of the Disinherited blew up the following year, the rebels had to adopt new tactics.

Many of the Disinherited abandoned their castles and took to what we would call guerilla warfare - ‘to the woods and fields’, as one chronicler put it. In this respect their strategy was very similar to that of the Scots in the Wars of Independence. Both deliberately avoided battle and operated from hideouts in wild country: the forest of Selkirk in the case of the Scots, the meres and fens of Ely and Axholme in the case of the Disinherited.

Unable to face the superior forces of Henry III in open battle, the Disinherited switched to hit-and-run tactics and hitting royalist supply lines. This kind of strategy was nothing new, and indeed central to medieval warfare. As Robert Wace, a twelfth century Norman poet, expressed it:

“Go through this country with fire,

destroying houses and towns,

take all booty and food,

pigs and sheep and cattle.

Let Normans find no food

Nor any thing on which to live.”

The rebel bands in the midlands lurked along the Great North Road, the main artery of trade and commerce linking north and south. From their base at Axholme, they rode out to plunder royalist merchants moving up and down the highway. One of their particular targets was Peter Beraud, one of the Lord Edward’s Italian creditors. They even attacked foreign dignitaries. In the summer of 1267, Alexander the Steward of Scotland was waylaid inside Sherwood Forest and held prisoner until his ransom was paid.

Many of these exploits have a distinctly Robin Hood flavour, which may be no coincidence. Later chroniclers such as Walter Bower placed the famous outlaw hero among the Disinherited in 1266, though he also made clear his disapproval:

“In that year also the disinherited English barons and those loyal to the king clashed fiercely, amongst them Roger de Mortimer, occupied the Welsh Marches and John de Eyvill occupied the Isle of Ely; Robert Hood was an outlaw among the woodland briars and thorns. Between them they inflicted a vast amount of slaughter on the common folk, cities and merchants”.

Another rebel tactic was to attack the Jewish communities in England. This was a way of wiping out their debts while also destroying a useful source of credit for the crown. The poor Jews themselves were left defenceless against the onslaught of savage fighting men.

In 1266 a band of Disinherited swooped down upon the Jewish quarter in Lincoln. They razed the synagogue, destroyed charters and deeds and butchered scores of innocents:

“That they have taken Lincoln, the Jews now

They take and destroy, breaking open the coffers;

Charters and deeds and whatever is injurious

To the Christians they have taken,

Treading them under foot,

Among the lanes, and woman and child,

They have put to the sword a hundred and sixty”.

Such ruthless tactics enabled the Disinherited to sustain a war of attrition for several years. They were up against some able opponents. Henry III himself, not renowned as one of England’s warrior-kings, could soldier when he really put his mind to it: witness his victory at Northampton in 1264, for instance. His heir the Lord Edward was an energetic and supremely confident military leader, while other royalist captains such as Henry of Almaine, Earl Warenne and Roger Leyburn were all formidable.

Outnumbered and out-resourced, the Disinherited had to find new leaders, and quickly. Their search for the next Simon de Montfort will be the subject of another post.

Warring cousins

One of the many side-dramas of the Montfortian era in England was the bitter ongoing feud between the Lord Edward (later Edward I) and Robert de Ferrers, 6^th earl of Derby (1239-79). These men were cousins, and very alike in some ways: both were ambitious, belligerent, full of energy and willing to stoop to low methods to gain their ends. They differed in that Edward learned from his mistakes, while Robert seemed intent on compounding his.

The arms of the 6th earl

The origins of their feud are debatable. It may have stemmed from Edward’s sale of his cousin’s wardship to the queen and Peter of Savoy in 1257, though such transactions were not uncommon. Equally it may have stemmed from mere personal animosity between men who were too similar to endure each other’s presence. Whatever the case, it soon led to conflict.

Robert struck first. In 1263, when the whole of England was on the verge of civil war, he attacked and captured three of Edward’s castles. Which ones are not stated, though Robert probably focused on ravaging his kinsman’s estates in Derbyshire and the High Peak country. In early February he turned south and sacked Worcester, destroying both the town and the Jewry. On 5 March he almost had Edward cornered at Gloucester, but the latter managed to slide out of the trap by tricking Henry de Montfort into accepting a truce. Robert was so furious at Henry’s gullibility he ‘struck in his spurs’ and galloped off back to the north country.

Chartley castle

A few weeks later, after the royalist victory at Northampton, Edward went on the offensive. He blazed through Robert’s lands in Derbyshire, throwing down castles and extorting protection money from the earl’s tenants. This was part of a two-pronged campaign: at the same time Edward’s ally, Prince Dafydd of Wales, led an army of Marchers over the border to ravage the Ferrers estates in Staffordshire. Robert was in London with Earl Simon, apparently unwilling or unable to defend his lands.

The wheel of fortune took another dramatic spin at the Battle of Lewes on 14 May, where Edward and his father, Henry III, were captured. This enabled Robert to launch a counter-offensive and chase Dafydd back into Wales. He was then attacked from an unexpected quarter. In December Earl Simon summoned Robert to London to answer ‘divers trespasses’ in the king’s name. He duly turned up and was thrown into the Tower. Either Robert’s actions had got out of hand, or Simon used them as a pretext to imprison the earl and seize his lands.

After Simon’s death at Evesham in August 1265, Robert was handed an opportunity to redeem his fortunes. Both Henry and Edward were willing to take him back into the fold, and he was offered a royal pardon. For reasons that are still unclear, Robert threw the offer back in their faces and went back into rebellion. He and his allies were defeated at Chesterfield in May 1266, where Robert didn’t exactly cover himself in glory. He was discovered hiding under a pile of woolsacks in a local church, and sent to prison at Windsor in a cage mounted on a wagon.

In 1269, after three years of captivity, Robert was swindled out of his inheritance. In one of the great medieval stitch-ups, the king and his sons forced the earl to sign away his lands under impossible terms of recovery. They were granted to Henry’s second son, Edmund, who became Earl of Lancaster. This formed the basis of the great Duchy of Lancaster enjoyed by John of Gaunt, Henry of Bolingbroke et al.

In a later age Robert’s head would have decorated a pike on Tower Bridge. Instead his life was spared. After the death of Henry III and Edward’s departure on crusade, the now-landless earl mustered his followers and tried to recover his lands by force. In 1271 he briefly occupied one of his estates in Berkshire, only to be driven away by Edmund of Lancaster. Two years later he popped up again in Staffordshire and stormed Chartley Castle, one of his old strongholds.

England was now threatened with another civil war. Robert gained the support of Earl Warenne and Earl Gilbert de Clare, while his lieutenant Roger Godberd waged a guerilla campaign in the Midlands. Ferrers loyalists in the High Peak launched attacks on Nottingham, and swore an oath to kill Edward when he returned to England. The situation was rescued by the prompt action of the regents. Edmund and his colleagues Roger Mortimer and Reynold Grey raced north to crush the northern conspiracy, and in 1274 Chartley was retaken in a brutal assault that slaughtered most of Robert’s surviving followers.

The fugitive earl escaped into the wild. When Edward finally returned, the new king took a surprisingly conciliatory line. Instead of destroying his old foe, he allowed him to sue for his lands at law. Robert managed to regain the manor of Chartley (though not the castle, which was staffed by a royal garrison) and the manor of Holbrook in Derbyshire. Thus he redeemed a fragment of his inheritance, and regained a stake in the landed affairs of the realm. Robert was quiet for the rest of his days, which were short: he died of the gout in 1279, aged just forty.

Old resentments died hard among the medieval aristocracy. Robert’s heir, John Ferrers, spent his life lobbying unsuccessfully for the return of his father’s estates. Perhaps to get him out of the kingdom, Edward II made John seneschal of Gascony and packed him off to govern the duchy. This proved a disaster as John deliberately ill-treated the Gascon nobility in order to cause trouble for the king. Even Philip IV of France, no friend to the Plantagenet regime, was moved to declare:

“The said John de Ferrers, we learn, behaves thus because just as the late king of England disinherited the said John’s father, so he wishes to disinherit his and our son Edward II, but may this enterprise, with God’s help, not succeed; but, if it is true, let him perish in his iniquity”.

Philip’s wish came true. The Gascon gentry had a straightforward method of dealing with oppressive outsiders, and arranged to have John murdered. He died of ‘noxious poison’ in 1312, the luckless son of a luckless father.